Get the Crucial P5 1TB with free heatsink for £80 (was £116)
So, let’s talk a little about that. The P5 is one of the fastest PCIe 3.0 drives that we’ve seen, with a rated read speed of 3400MB/s and write speeds of 3000MB/s. That’s some six to seven times faster than your standard SATA SSD (limited to ~550MB/s), and will make a huge difference to file transfer times. Random read and write speeds are also competitive, thanks to the inclusion of TLC NAND and a DRAM cache, and you should see a small advantage in game load times by switching from a SATA to NVMe drive. (Not as much as you’d find going from a mechanical hard drive to a SATA SSD, but still measurably better!) There are even faster PCIe 4.0 drives, but these tend to cost far more than £100 for a 1TB model - and they’re only really useful in the PS5, where they’re required, and for content creators working with truly gigantic files - such as 4K or 8K video clips, for instance. The included Akasa heatsink is quite basic, with a single-sided aluminium construction, but it should still dissipate heat effectively from its four fins. This helps keep performance consistently high even in hot PC cases, although you will need to ensure you have sufficient clearance to install it. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to check out our best gaming SSD recommendations for more on how and why choosing the right SSD can make a huge difference to PC gaming! Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you on the next one.
